OCSA’s YoungArts Winners

Ryan Jeong

Exploring disciplines ranging from visual arts, dancing, to music, YoungArts celebrates the talents of artists on a national level and provides them with training that helps build their careers.

From OCSA’s own YoungArts winners of 2022, I was able to interview Cheungwan (Amy) Wang (VA ‘23) for the Visual Arts Category, Jocelyn (Josie) Wang (PM ‘23) for the Songwriters Category, David Du (FTV ‘24) for the Film Category, Edward Chen (IA/BR ‘24) for the Dance Category, and Nathan Tatsuta (IM-J ‘24).

Amy Wang described the most rewarding part of this competition to be writing the artist statement for YoungaArts. She said, “I realized my artworks do have a cohesive theme: they are usually about animal welfare or social issues. I didn’t notice this before writing that artist statement.” 

Josie Wang described her own personal experience as an artist, saying, “[A]s a songwriter, or even just as an artist, I feel like it’s pretty common to have unfinished work. I have hundreds of song sections sitting in my Notes app... I think the most rewarding part about applying to YoungArts was having three finished songs by the end of it, and being proud of finished pieces of art I had created.”

Applying for YoungArts takes a great deal of work, as well as perfecting one’s artistic craft to present it for review, all while knowing that you are in a competition against thousands of other artists around the nation. Chen, who won the finalist award for Hip Hop dance, stated, “It was definitely daunting to start this application, and choreographing a two-minute solo didn’t happen overnight. However, taking the application week by week encouraged me to believe in my own abilities and gave me the confidence to hit the ‘submit’ button.”

An advice to the 2023 YoungArts winners to conquer this stress is to not procrastinate, understand your limits, and to continue forward on your artistic journey. Chen advised, “I find that perfectionism is the greatest catalyst of procrastination. Understand that any first draft will be terrible.” He described his strategy of “vomiting [his] ideas for the entire two-minute solo first, without worrying whether or not the combinations were actually good and then going back and revising and editing them.” Du advised, “Don't make art for the sake of applying to YoungArts ... the main reason that you work on a project should be because you truly are passionate and love the project, regardless of what awards you win.” Du stated that he spent over a year working on his film and that he hadn’t even considered submitting it to YoungArts.